, Jane Tomimori1, Sofia Beatriz Machado de Mendonça1 and Douglas Antonio Rodrigues1
(1)
Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Thinking of the body, you can mistakenly face it as purely biological, a universal patrimony whereupon the culture would write different histories. After all, men of different nationalities show physical similarities. However, in addition to physical similarities or differences, a set of meanings that each society writes on their members’ body through time, these meanings define the body in various ways. Daolio, 1995
The original idea of this book arose from the observation of the high prevalence of skin diseases in the daily routine of health professionals who work for the Primary Health Care in Amazon’s indigenous areas and the absence of adequate support material for these professionals.
As a result of an action-research called “Dermatologic Investigation and Evaluation of Jorge Lobo’s Disease Evolution in Caiabi Indigenous People, Central Brazil,” financed by the São Paulo Research Foundation – Fapesp (process 2006/03908-0), which had as its objectives, besides reviewing the Jorge Lobo’s disease cases, the performance of an investigation into the prevalence of dermatosis in the villages of the middle, lower, and upper regions of the Xingu Indigenous Park and the local health staff’s capacity to manage mainly skin diseases found in their daily local services. The production of this atlas was made by the cooperation of the Xingu Project, the Department of Preventive Medicine, and the Department of Dermatology of Escola Paulista de Medicina/Unifesp (EPM/UNIFESP).
It seemed important to present in this book, besides scientific knowledge, the indigenous people’s vision of their own bodies and skin, the way they think, classify, and interfere with the health-disease process, and which therapeutic itinerary they adopt to treat skin-related issues.
1.1 The Body and the Skin: Center of Social Signs
The body and, in particular, the skin are a person’s introduction to their environment and community , which is why it is believed to represent an individual’s contact with the external, ruled by culture. Such signs as tattoos, paintings, and scarifications can be registered on the body and reveal what group a person belongs to, her social status, or even her state of mind.
As a canvas, the skin can display several drawings, combining colors and adornments, depending on the moment, one’s state of mind or health, or the ritual one is participating in. In general, during mourning periods the body is not painted or adorned, thereby revealing sorrowful feelings.
According to David Le Breton , in his book A Sociologia do Corpo 1 on bodily inscriptions:
Social and cultural bodily markings can be completed by direct writing by the collective on the actor’s skin. It can be made in the form of removal, deformation, or addition. This symbolic modeling is relatively frequent in human societies: ritual ablation of a bodily fragment (prepuce, clitoris, teeth, fingers, tonsure, etc.); epidermis marking (scarifications, incisions, apparent scar, infibulation, teeth modeling, etc.); tegumentary inscriptions in the form of permanent or temporary tattoos, make-up, etc.; body form modifications […]; use of jewelry or objects that deform the body: reed rings and pearls that cause, to the individual growth, a neck extension, inserting disks in the upper and lower lips […]. These bodily markings fulfill different functions in each society. Seduction instruments are more often a ritual way of indicating affiliation or segregation. They symbolically integrate people within their community or clan, separating them from other communities or clans and, at the same time, the surrounding nature. They humanize the person, putting him socially in the world […]. They reproduce the social status or, more specifically, the matrimonial status in a world that can be read by everybody.
Regarding the body and the skin as the center of social meanings, Clastres2 reveals another perspective, the body “as written surface […] able to receive the legible law text,”, obedience to rules and social laws , particularly when referring to the role of suffering and scars. The body is the memory, for example, in the initiatory rituals of indigenous societies, scarifications, tattoos, or other procedures that leave a mark, a mark that tells the story of the subject’s life. Changes in the body and skin occur during every biological cycle, and such changes are for adolescents the most important moments for modeling purposes.
In the initiatory ritual, the society prints its mark on the youngest bodies… The mark is an obstacle for forgetfulness, the body brings printed on itself the skin grooves memory – the body is a memory. The mark proclaims surely its belonging to the group… The society dictates its laws to the members, inscribes the law texts on body surface […]. The mark on the body, like on all bodies, states: “you will have no desire for power, neither covet be submissive”, and this law does not separate and can be only inserted in a non-separated space: the body itself (Clastres, 2000, p. 196).
Among the Ikpeng , for example, children around seven and nine years old must have a tattoo on their face, which is a characteristic mark of this people, in a rite of passage. The whole village mobilizes for the party:
The main party celebrated by this people, the Ikpeng, is Moyngo, in which boys’ faces are tattooed. The ritual is preceded by many dance sessions and, in the end, by a big hunt, in which the to-be-tattooed children’s fathers, who are the hosts, participate. After about 1 month, an expedition messenger is sent to the village announcing the hunters’ return. The next day, during a dance session, to the sound of flutes and the indigenous chief’s voice, the hunters arrive with a huge basket full of prey.
The hunters camp next to the village and women go there to take hunt made in a moquém and leave beijus. The participants cover the body with some wood resin and stick bird feathers on it. They go in the village at nightfall and drink sweet perereba (kind of porridge). Next, each man dances holding in one hand a to-be-tattooed child and in the other a torch. Again, they spend a whole night dancing. Lastly, at the end of the party in the morning, the children are tattooed. First, they make incisions (stripes) on the children’s faces with a tucum thorn and then they pass the coal extracted from the courbaril resin (Instituto Socioambiental, undated).
1.2 The Skin as the Body Limit and the Exchange of Substances
Concern for the body, and the skin in particular, is huge among indigenous peoples, aesthetically and functionally. The aesthetics and beauty are adored from the beginning of life, in early childhood.
The skin, the body’s boundary and place of contact with the external, also has a key role in the protection of the body and, at the same time, works as an entry way for medicines. Many procedures are performed on the skin to protect the body using special paints, mainly on children, using pequi, tucum, or maripa palm fruit oils. Annatto or saffron, for example, keeps bad spirits and insects away. Annatto paste, genipap, bird feathers, certain tree resins, and cotton are used as clothes or costumes in rites and parties. For indigenous people, a painted body is a healthy body.
Body modeling starts in toddlers, tying the leg under the knee, so that the child’s leg will get more beautiful. Tying is also done in the arm, at the height of the deltoid muscle insertion, so it becomes more beautiful and rounded.
For numerous disease treatments, the skin constitutes a particular part, either for removing inoculated objects by mama’eor spirits or for absorbing the healing characteristics of plants. In many therapeutic procedures, baths are performed with herbs, leaves, tree bark, or roots. The skin can also be scarified to purify the body by removing dark blood and what it contains; to eliminate laziness, one of the factors that cause diseases; and to enable the entrance of medicines.
Next, the care provided for body and skin used in different events and stages of community life are discussed .
1.3 The Process Health-Disease and the Social Representation of Skin Diseases
During the process of organizing and implementing health services in indigenous areas, starting with scientific knowledge and biomedicine, quite different healing systems and therapeutic itineraries were found.
The vision of the progression of an illness and the conception of the body and health these peoples have relate to their world vision. Disease does not exist outside of the sociocultural context, health-disease interplay happens from the representation of disease in each society and reveals itself, basically, in three dimensions: subjective, biophysical, and sociocultural. These dimensions consider the feelings of being sick, the signals and physical symptoms, and the sociocultural group perceptions of being sick. These three realities interact continually in a dynamic and procedural form [1].
To the indigenous people of Xingu skin diseases are associated with nourishment, violations of social rules, contagion from other sick people, and spells, depending on the kind of wound and its evolution, according to interviews with health officials together with wise men, shamans and herb doctors, from their communities. More recently, they have started to associate some kinds of skin disease with a lack of self-hygiene, mainly related to the use of clothes, blankets, and hammocks, without the necessary care.
In many stories, the etiology of a skin disease is related to animal spirits and other nature spirits that frequently have something in common with the wound. For instance, when eating spotted eagle ray, it is common to see round and whitish wounds on the body, just like the ray. The same thing happens with the lowland paca, which has “spots” all over its body. In another example, if a pregnant mother eats honey from a certain kind of bee, her child will have wounds on its body resembling the bites of this kind of bee.
Besides physical similarities to nature spirits, the explanations given for the appearance of skin diseases lead us to origin myths, which exist in different versions depending on the storyteller’s knowledge. At any rate, they reveal and give meaning to many rules of behavior and relations to other people, and transgression of those rules causes disease.
These stories are transcriptions from interviews with students of the course of indigenous health agents from the Xingu Indigenous Park, as field research work in their communities, on the topic of skin diseases, intestinal parasites, and environment, conducted in June 2007, at the Pavuru plant of DSEI Xingu/MT.
One of the explanations for a skin disease called mirukai in the Kaiabi people’s language burn similar to erysipelas, has its explanation in the myth of food origin, as the health agents tell us, based on their interviews with the oldest and wisest men from the community:
In the past, there were no foods like corn, cassava, peanut, fava beans, pepper, potato, yam, mangarito, sweet cassava, cotton, calabash and janyrũ, which is a kind of calabash used to keep tucum oil. The Kaiabi people spent many years without these foods. People lived starving. They only ate wild fruits, for example, maripa palm fruit, tucum, moriche palm fruit, chestnut, cocoa, banana brava fruit, and honey.
Many years passed until the children of a widowed woman, named Kupeirup, as they went out to the bushes looking for honey and fruits, could not find anything else; it was hard to find something, because the fruits they had planted did not grow fast. For this reason, they did not have any fruit to eat in that region, and their mother, worried, said:
“Boys, I am very sorry for you, because you are not finding fruits and honey. The trees you planted will not grow soon, they will take some time to bear fruit. Therefore, I ask you to prepare a big plantation field. When you set fire, take me to the middle of the plantation field and burn me as well. When my body burns up, it will grow farm products for you.”
They became sad about what their mother told them and asked if it was necessary:
“Why are we doing it to you, mistreating you? You are our mother. We just want to take care of you. We are not doing that to you.”
Their mother repeated:
“If you do not do that to me, you will never have food.”
They answered:
“We will miss the food, but we cannot burn you up. It will not be good for us.”
Their mother repeated:
“My sons, I know you are worried about me, but you need not worry. I ask you to burn me, because I will return to you.”
The sons said:
“We will do it, mother.”
However, they became sad because of this decision.
They made a big plantation field. First, they cleared the land, then took it over. After overthrowing the owners of the plantation field down, they told their mother. She repeated:
“Boys, it is time to burn the plantation field, then you will burn me. Do not be sad because of me, I will return to you. I am going to become a lowland paca and I will be around the field. At that time you have to set a trap and catch me in the trap. Do not let me escape. If this happens, I will not return to you. When you burn the plantation field, scream to burn me. When I hear your shouting, I will sow the plantation field. After burning the field, you must go far from there, choose another place to live and grow fruit to eat.”
That is how she instructed her sons.
She continued explaining what they were supposed to do:
“Time will pass and you will see a caica parrot flying over your heads. This will be the first alert, which means food is growing. Then, two caica parrots will fly over your heads, telling you about some crops, like corn, that are growing. After some time, many caica parrots will fly over your heads. This will be the signal that the crops will be ready for you. Therefore, from that day you will not starve anymore, because many crops will grow.”
Kupeirup explained to her sons about food preparation and taught them how to conserve seeds and seedlings, so they would not consume them all, keeping the crops, so that when they cleared the land and planting time came, the seeds would be well preserved. She also taught her sons to take good care of the crops so they would never be consumed or disappear.
She repeated many times her instruction to her sons. Once she finished instructing them, she said:
“The time to burn the plantation field has arrived. Now you can take my hammock and hang it in the middle of the field, I will be lying there.”
They took their mother’s hammock and set it in the middle of the field. After lying on the hammock, she asked her sons to set fire to the field. As the field was burning, they screamed and called their mother’s name, saying:
“We are burning the field for you, mother, lady Kupeirup Kooooo!!!”Related posts:
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